Desfest : App for event discovery & engagement for creatives

We designed an information-based platform at compiles all the design festivals/exhibitions/ conferences for students and design professionals from all over the country.

A recurring issue that comes up amongst our close design community is the understanding of which events and festivals are of importance. When there are hundreds of exhibitions happening, it becomes essential to identify the events that we can benefit from. This source of reliable information is amiss in design communities all around us. We found an opportunity here and the outcome of this course is a work in progress towards the solution.

User research
In order to understand the target audience thoroughly and identify their needs, and opinions we conducted our research through both secondary and primary methods. The questions we framed were aimed to elicit the most honest answer possible from the crowd. Following were the insights that we gathered through a survey from target audience both digitally and physically:

1. People really look forward to these festivals but they are very few that they are aware of.
2. Registration systems are complex and information about the event is not given in a specific manner
3. Due to the lack of knowledge people tend to miss a lot of interesting stuff.
4. Websites aren’t always up to date and details are hard to find.
5. Festivals are usually long generally 3-day duration, with unclear information it is difficult to spend so much money.

Market research
Platforms like Book my show, Insider, Ticket Ninja, Event Brite allow users to know about events happening in a particular location. However, these interfaces don’t give specific design-related information, events, festivals, conferences that happen in the country.

While using different applications we got to know that these applications showcase events related to stand-ups, movies, large scale events (which are highly funded).

At the end of our research we boiled down to opportunity areas:

1. A collaborative platform for students and professionals in the field of design.
2. A platform that deals in sharing of information and for the affordance of users.
3. Help design community come together
4. Learn while you share
5. A reliable platform for users.

Initial approach

To address the need for collaboration of skills through sharing we boiled down to two solutions

1. Work on earn while you learn programs by promoting young entrepreneurs to share their skills and earn some pocket money. We thought of promoting some student-led business initiatives e.g. opening a café, stationery shop, platform to share library books on the rental or promoting bike in the campus (all student-led)
2. Work over creating an information-based platform for design students, professions by bringing the community together through sharing details about design events, festivals, conferences, exhibitions.

After analyzing user survey both quantitative and qualitative. We narrowed to the second option for creating a system around the same.

Observing existing websites helped us create insights on the flow of information to be provided for a better user experience.

We worked over user flow for the features that the interface would focus on to enhance user experience. Further analysis was done to get clarity on the flow of information and communicating it to the users.

To encourage user engagement we recreated experiences in a modular format.

Sea of pain was one such event we re-simulated: